John Calipari hasn’t held an official position in the NBA since the turn of the century, but his fingerprints are all over the league as we know it. Coach Cal has only one NCAA title to his name, but in just nine seasons in Lexington, he’s turned the University of Kentucky into an assembly line for professional players — both in the NBA and in leagues across the globe. This week, we’re exploring Kentucky’s and Calipari’s impact on the basketball world, and whether or not his one-and-done blueprint has staying power at both the college and pro levels. Welcome to the Kentucky Basketball Association.
For all the wonder and exclamatory tweets that an Anthony Davis performance can elicit, an interview with the Unicorn That Was Promised is more like a Mark Price jumper: quick and to the point. I spent nearly two years peppering Davis with questions ranging from Donald Trump’s election to Langston Galloway’s impact on the second unit, and the 20-something All-Star rarely broke from his particular brand of monotone indifference. To say that Davis lets his play do the talking is an understatement.
Except when it comes to his alma mater. Bring up Kentucky or John Calipari or another Wildcats player talking too much shit for his own good and Davis’s eyes will grow wide like you just served up a wide-open alley-oop.
Davis is hardly unique among Coach Cal alumni in that regard. One of the rules of being a part of the exclusive one-and-done club appears to be that you have to talk, often, about the exclusive one-and-done club. Specifically, how your Kentucky team was better than the other eight that Calipari has stewarded since landing in Lexington in 2009. Even as the Wildcats entered the 2015 NCAA tournament undefeated, John Wall would hear none of it. “We were a better team,” Wall said.
But for all the five-star prospects that Calipari has graduated to the pros, his biggest accomplishment probably isn’t the NCAA title (in 2012), Final Four appearances (four with UK, six overall), or even the elite-level teams he puts out on the court (basically all of them). It’s the amount of players he’s gotten paid.
Scan any roster of the 30 NBA franchises and you’re likely to find a player hailing from the University of Kentucky. Twenty-seven former Wildcats currently dot lineups across the league—more than any other college in the country—and all but two of them are Calipari products. Another is on a two-way contract, a few more are in the G League, and more still can be found on teams around the globe.
So while former players may debate the hypothetical title-winner among their various draft classes, the better question might be: Who’s the best player Calipari ever produced?
To that end, we present you: Big Bracket Nation.
A few notes on the methodology on this very important thought exercise:
We’re including only players Calipari coached in college.
We named one of the regions in honor of Cal’s two-plus seasons as head coach of the New Jersey Nets, but he didn’t “recruit” those players, so they don’t count. Sorry, Kerry Kittles.
The Memphis and UMass years matter.
Calipari’s legend as Ace Recruiter truly took shape when he arrived in Lexington in 2009. For instance, of the 32 players that made the cut of the first round of our bracket, 26 (or 81 percent) are former Wildcats—including all four 1-seeds. But his past NCAA stops, at UMass (1988-96) and Memphis (2000-09), are still part of both his story, and thus the NCAA’s and NBA’s. Cal’s success with one-and-doners like Derrick Rose and Tyreke Evans ultimately became the blueprint (or Blueprint, if you will) for the approach he would later master at Kentucky. And let’s be honest: If he hadn’t uprooted in 2009, while under the watchful eye of the NCAA’s G-Men, a lot of these players would have probably suited up in Memphis’s particular shade of blue. (DeMarcus Cousins, for instance, initially committed to the Tigers before following Calipari to UK.)
The full breakdown of alma maters is as follows:
Kentucky: Cousins (1), Davis (1), Karl-Anthony Towns (1), John Wall (1), Eric Bledsoe (2), Devin Booker (2), Jamal Murray (3), Julius Randle (3), De’Aaron Fox (3), Willie Cauley-Stein (4), Enes Kanter (4), Brandon Knight (4), Patrick Patterson (4), Bam Adebayo (5), Michael Kidd-Gilchrist (5), Trey Lyles (5), Nerlens Noel (5), Skal Labissiere (6), Malik Monk (6), Darius Miller (6), Tyler Ulis (6), Terrence Jones (7), DeAndre Liggins (7), Aaron and Andrew Harrison (7), Josh “Jorts” Harrellson (8), James Young (8)
Memphis: Rose (2), Evans (3), Chris Douglas-Roberts (7), Joey Dorsey (8), Dajuan Wagner (8)
UMass: Marcus Camby (2)
(Shouts to the pride of Hartford.)
No current Kentucky players.
Eligibility rules, y’know?
We’re factoring in the entire scope of a player’s career.
This is important. While Calipari had day-to-day oversight of the assembled field only in college—and in most cases, for one season of college—these players’ impact on the game goes wayyyyy beyond the Big Dance. A lot of these guys also became completely different players in the pros. Davis, for instance, had as many blocks as he did points in the 2012 national championship game but is now shooting 3s and putting up 40 points with regularity.
So, while we want you to include the quality and the quantity of a player’s contributions at both levels into your evaluations, we’re skewing more toward the consideration process for the Basketball Hall of Fame: College careers matter, but NBA careers matter more.
Aaron and Andrew Harrison count as one person.
Prove me wrong.
About the voting.
Each matchup in every round will be dictated by your votes. The polls will open—both here and on Twitter (@ringer)—around 9 a.m. ET every morning, and close around 11 p.m. ET each night for the next five nights. The first round kicks off on Monday (March 12), the second round is Tuesday, the Elite Eight is Wednesday, the Final Four is Thursday, and the grand finale is Friday. You get to vote only once, so make it count.
Without further ado, here are the first-round matchups:
Lexington Region
Memphis Region
Amherst Region
East Rutherford Region
